Fashion is in a state of flux. Whether the system is broken or whether patience has gone the way of the horse-drawn carriage can be debated. What’s clear is that the global reach and immediacy of the digital world has increased awareness of and desire for fashion. It has also shown up the lag time between presentation and fulfillment, which can run up to six months later. In a see-it-want-it-now world, that might as well be eons. While there’s no consensus yet as to how the situation can be fixed, Vetements, Burberry, and Tom Ford will break with the current system going forward.

So is the upcoming Fall 2016 season the last as we’ve known them? Or rather, as we’ve known them since the Fall 1998 season, when modernist Helmut Lang, perhaps the most emulated designer among the new gen, turned the system, successfully, on its head using technology to democratize the experience of seeing his collection? (A season later, Lang would move his live runway show from Paris to New York; he is the reason the season starts in the U.S. rather than it once had, in Europe.)

For Lang, this was much more than the mere flip of a calendar page. The presentation of his Fall 1998 collection on the Internet was part of his inclusive, forward-thinking, and technology-friendly philosophy. And it made sense in terms of his aesthetic, too: It wasn’t a stretch to think that a designer who embraced minimalism and tech fabrics and who had long incorporated elements of workwear into his garments would be tech-savvy. The same could not be said of the fashion world at the time.